Picturing Mind ������������� �� �����&������ ������������ General Editor: Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe Editorial Board: Anna Bonshek, John Danvers, William S. Haney II, Amy Ione, Arthur Versluis, Christopher Webster Picturing Mind Paradox, Indeterminacy and Consciousness in Art & Poetry JOHN DANVERS Amsterdam - New York, NY 2006 Cover Design: Aart Jan Bergshoeff The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 90-420-1809-7 ISSN: 1573-2193 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2006 Printed in the Netherlands Contents Preface 7 Part 1 Introduction – an opening, an entering 11 Part 2 The knowing body: art as an integrative process of cognition 17 Part 3 Interrogating appearances: being, seeing & showing 37 Part 4 The mutuality of existence: drawing, emptiness & presence 65 Part 5 Picturing mind – writing being 101 Part 6 The self as open-work: permeability, incompleteness & revisibility 131 Part 7 Mind, the real & the other 159 Part 8 Where we are: locus of mind-in-the-world 191 Part 9 The ! the One & the Many: mysticism, art & poetry 261 Part 10 The discontinuum of consciousness: ambiguity, indeterminacy & multiplicity 313 Part 11 A leaving, an unending. A folding, an unfolding 345 Bibliography 353 Index 363 * For Philippa, Joanna, Tom and Jenny * Acknowledgements I am very grateful to the research committee of the Faculty of Arts, University of Plymouth, for awarding me a sabbatical semester in which to do most of the writing of this book, and to colleagues in the Faculty for their support and comradeship over the years. I’d like to thank the following journals, publishers and organisations for allow- ing me to include revised versions of, or extracts from, papers in this volume: NSEAD & its journal iJADE for most of an essay, The Knowing Body: Art as an Integrative System of Knowledge, (1995) and for extracts from, Towards a Radical Pedagogy: Provisional notes on Learning and Teaching in Art & Design (2003); ISSEI for extracts from book reviews (1998; 2005); and Trentham Books (2004) for extracts used in Part 6. I’m also grateful for having participated in the affairs of ISSEI (International Society for the Study of European Ideas), particularly its conferences, over many years, and for a stimulating association with Daniel Meyer-Dinkgrafe, the editor, and other members of the editorial board of, and contributors to, the internet journal, Conscious- ness, Literature and the Arts. Many thanks to Pat and Dave for a few weeks of quiet reflection and good reading in Pat’s studio in Colorado. Finally I’d like to thank all those students with whom I’ve explored many of the ideas in this book. Any merits the book may have are largely due to countless stimulating interactions with enquiring minds in seminars over many years. On the other hand the many faults of the book are entirely my responsibility. Preface It might be useful to the reader to know something of the composi- tional history of this book and to have a brief outline of the main themes. A first draft of Part 2 was written back in 1994 and published in 1995. (Danvers 1995: 289-297) In revising it for this volume I realise that much of it still seems to be relevant, providing as it does a non- specialist framework with which to think about perception, the embodied mind and art as a mode of knowing. At the time, and to some extent still, there was/is a widespread view that the primary function of art was/is as a mode of expression, a vehicle for the display and direct transfer of emotion or feeling from the artist to the viewer via the art object. This seems to me to be only one side of the story and needs to be counterbalanced by another narrative articulat- ing the cognitive function of art - if art is to be taken seriously as a mode of doing, knowing and being. Part 3 is based on notes and papers written between 1995 and 2000 when my own art practice was focused on the making of drawings and paintings that analysed the ways in which we encounter objects as perceptual and cognitive events. At the time I considered myself as making a very small contribution to the long history of still-life painting, a tradition which, in my view, still has much unfinished business in relation to investigating and celebrating how we engage with a world that has material physicality at one level and yet is also a field of immaterial energies at another level. Part 4 takes a step further some of the ideas and issues arising from the practice of observational drawing and painting, exploring the ways in which we exist as interdependent participants in a field of relation- ships. Buddhist concepts of sunyata, ‘emptiness’, and tathata, 8 Preface ‘suchness’, are discussed in relation to the sceptical dialectics of Pyrrho and Nagarjuna. In Part 5 art and poetry are analysed as modes of picturing mind and writing being, ways of opening and disclosing what it is to be part of the consciousness of the world. Examples of works by Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage are considered within a frame- work of the poetics of Philip Whalen and Charles Olson. Part 6 expands on the idea of art as a way of picturing mind by analysing Umberto Eco’s proposition of the artwork as “open work” and Barthes’ theories about “readerly” and “writerly” texts. A theme of the self as open work is developed as a way of thinking about different aspects of consciousness, being and becoming. Reference is made to the work of the artist Helen Chadwick, and to Merleau- Ponty’s ideas about art as a process of embodiment and participation in the world. These ideas are discussed in relation to reflections on incompleteness, openness and revisibility – another thematic strand that weaves its way throughout the whole book. In Part 7 notions of otherness and the real are discussed in relation to a number of examples of artworks and poems by R.S. Thomas, Robin Blaser, Robert Duncan, Minimalism, Ad Reinhardt and others. The arts are considered as potential ways of gaining empathic access to otherness, particularly with a brief reference to Fred Wah’s thinking about hybridity and colonisation. The idea of nature as other is explored as an aspect of the thinking of Heidegger and Gary Snyder. Part 8 explores many different approaches taken by artists and poets to nature. The arts are considered as a locus of mind-in-the-world - how we are and where we are as beings sharing a planet with other beings. Themes of mapping, walking, journeying, emplacement and being-in- the-world are discussed in relation to a varied array of examples: from the writers and poets Guy Davenport, Gary Snyder, Kenneth White, David Abram and Charles Waterton, to the artists Richard Long, Susan Derges, Ian Hamilton Finlay, John Wolseley and others. Ideas drawn from Goethe, Ruskin and studies of shamanism and Palaeo- lithic cultures, are used to frame and shed light on the different examples. Preface 9 In Part 9 the particular modes of consciousness that have become known as mysticism are explored in relation to contrasting descriptive analyses proposed by William James, Bertrand Russell, Thomas Merton, Heidegger and others. Mysticism is considered as a particu- larly intense state of awareness and cognition, articulated and realised in the writings and artefacts produced by artists, poets and mystics within many cultures. Ideas about unity, unknowing, ineffability, infinity and the metaphysics of light are discussed in relation to examples of accounts of mystical experiences within the Christian, Taoist and Sufi traditions, and in relation to the art and poetry of Anish Kapoor, James Turrell, Agnes Martin, Jorge Luis Borges, Kenneth Rexroth and others. Part 10 continues many of the themes already introduced and consid- ers these as they are manifested in particular modes of construction and composition in the visual arts and poetry. Ideas about the discon- tinuum of consciousness are discussed alongside indeterminacy, contradiction, perspectivism, revisibility, non-dualism and associative thinking - as qualities and principles that energise and direct many forms of practice in the arts. Reference is made to the work of John Cage, Thomas McEvilley, Anne Carson and Richard Rorty amongst others. The final section, Part 11, briefly condenses many of the above strands of thought into the notion of a contrarium – a clearing in which apparent contradictions, conflicts and paradoxes are held in a state of indeterminacy and open possibility. A visualisation of the contrarium is presented in diagrammatic form – a suggestion of what might be called an aesthetics and poetics of indeterminacy. NB. An important dimension of the book, almost a contrary text, are the images and more unusual textual episodes that are presented as a visual counterpoint to the main body of the text. These showings offer different perspectives on, and manifestations of, the themes and ideas outlined above. All the images are made by the author. They have been deliber- ately left without annotations to emphasise their visuality. As quiet interruptions to the hum of the text I hope they provide a parallel stream of openings and clearings - other ways of picturing mind.